Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/86

70 See the array of natural means provided for the development and education of the heart. Spiritual love, joining with the instinctive passion which peoples the world, attracts mankind into little binary groups, families of two. Therein we are all born of love. Love watches over our birth. Our earliest knowledge of mankind is of one animated by the instinctive power of affection, developed into conscious love. The first human feeling extended towards us is a mother's love. Even the rude woman in savage Patagonia turns her sunniest aspect to her child; the father does the same. In our earliest years we are almost wholly in the hands of women, in whom the heart emphatically prevails over the head. They attract and win, while man only invades and conquers. The first human force we meet is woman's love. All this tends to waken and unfold the affections, to give them their culture, and hasten their growth. The other children of kindred blood, asking or giving kind offices; affectionate relations and friends, who turn out the fairest side of nature and themselves to the new-born stranger, — all of these are helps in the education of the heart. All men unconsciously put on amiable faces in the presence of children, thinking it is not good to cause these little ones to offend. As the roughest of men will gather flowers for little children, so in their presence he turns out "the silver lining" of his cloudy character to the young immortals, and would not have them know the darker part. The sourest man is not wholly hopeless when he will not blaspheme before his son.

The child's affection gets developed on the smallest scale at first. The mother's love tempts forth the son's; he loves the bosom that feeds him, the lips which caress, the person who loves. Soon the circle widens, and includes brothers and sisters, and familiar friends; then gradually enlarges more and more, the affections strengthening as their empire spreads. So love travels from person to person, from the mother or nurse to the family at home; then to the relatives and frequent guests; next to the children at school, to the neighbourhood, the town, the State, the nation ; and at last manly love takes in the whole family of mankind, counting nothing alien that is human.

You often find men lamenting the lack of early educa-